"We Americans today are focused on the wrong threats to American democracy. We are obsessed with threats from overseas: from terrorists and Islamist extremists, and from other countries. But realistically, while terrorists and Islamists and other countries will continue to cause trouble for us, the chance of their ending American democracy is nil. The only real threat to American democracy comes from Americans themselves. If our politicians continue to yield to pressure from extremists not to compromise and remain mired in gridlock, the majority of decent Americans may in frustration come to view an authoritarian government as the only solution to political gridlock — as a lesser evil that has to be tolerated."

"At the start of 2014, former Seventh-Day Adventist pastor Ryan Bell made an unusual New Year's resolution: to live for one year without God. This, reflecting his own loss of faith. He kept a blog documenting his journey and has a documentary crew following him.

After a year, Bell tells NPR's Arun Rath, "I've looked at the majority of the arguments that I've been able to find for the existence of God and on the question of God's existence or not, I have to say I don't find there to be a convincing case in my view."

The futility of politics in America these days has driven the public into exactly the dream-state of zombie blood-lust depicted in so many popular video fantasies, a nightmare of decay, powerlessness, and degeneracy matching the actual condition of a disintegrating polity that has lost collective consciousness and seeks only to infect the dwindling numbers of the still-sentient. Almost nobody in this country believes we can manage our affairs anymore.

Well, can we? One of the hallmarks of an imploding culture is that people lose a sense of consequence. Things just seem to happen and unhappen, and nobody really cares about chains of decision and event. Anything goes and nothing matters.

One reason this is happening to us is that we allowed reality to be divorced from truth. Karl Rove wasn’t kidding back in the Bush-2 days when he quipped that “we create our own reality.” The part old Karl left out is that there’s a price for doing that. In the short run, it allows you to pretend that you have superpowers and can act in defiance of the way things really are. In the longer run, your view of the world comports so poorly with the facts of the world that things stop working.

The tragedy of Barack Obama is that he continued the basic Karl Rove doctrine only without bragging about it. I don’t know whether Mr. Obama was a hostage, an empty suit, or a fool, but he broadened and deepened the acquiescence to lying about just about everything. Did criminal misconduct run rampant in banking for years? Oh, nevermind. Is the US economy actually contracting instead of recovering? We’ll just make up better numbers. Did US officials act like Nazi war criminals in torturing prisoners? Well, yeah, but so what? Did the State Department and the CIA scuttle the elected Ukrainian government in order to start an unnecessary new conflict with Russia? Maybe so, but who cares? Was the Affordable Care Act a swindle in the service of insurance and pharmaceutical racketeering? Oh, we’ll read the bill after we pass it. Shale oil will make us “energy independent.” (Not.)

Has anyone noticed the way these incongruities percolate into the public attention and then get dismissed, like daydreams, with no resolution. I’ve harped on this one before because it was, to my mind, Obama’s greatest failure: When the Supreme Court decided in the Citizens United case that corporations were entitled to express their political convictions by buying off politicians, why didn’t the President join with his then-Democratic majority congress to propose legislation, or a constitutional amendment, more clearly redefining the difference between corporate “personhood” and the condition of citizenship? How could this constitutional lawyer miss the reality that corporations legally and explicitly do not have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the public interest but only to their shareholders? How was this not obvious? And why was there not a rush to correct it?

Of course, this only begs the question: where are the opponents to the ethos that anything goes and nothing matters? Where are the political figures who can sustain a complaint long enough, and loudly enough, to keep it in the public consciousness clearly enough to make a difference? The more conspiracy-minded might say that the security apparatus (the NSA and its servelings) or Wall Street actually run the country and somehow suppress opposition. I don’t believe that. I do believe that cultures go through tragic periods when they lose their bearings and the will to be truthful to themselves.

The latest news is that Mr. Jeb Bush is way ahead among his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination, leading to a beautiful setup for the battle of the dynasties: Bush versus Clinton in 2016. I believe that insulting prospect would be the wake-up call that will hit the American people upside the head and wake them out of their zombie rapture. A third party will arise. It may be a good one or a bad one, but it will blow the existing order of things apart, as it should.

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Global warming is a flat-out fiction!Climate change isn't happening at all! There is no science, no science to support global warming!

I occasionally listen to right-wing reactionary talk radio programs and the declarations above are examples of the latest fulminations from their hosts and guests. There seems to be a new stridency to the bombast of climate change denial over the past few weeks ... no doubt because of last month's massive "People's Climate March" in New York City before the United Nations Climate Summit.

Of course, on right-wing radio there is never a serious citation or reference noted that counters the scientific evidence and consensus demonstrating anthropogenic global warming. The most one hears is the canard that there hasn't been any warming for the past 20 years, or that human beings are just too impotent and insignificant to have any real impact on the world's environment.

The explanation for the global climate change theory from the denialists is that it is all part of a grand conspiracy to impose Marxism over the entire planetary population of people. (Really.)

The fervent opposition to the scientific facts that demonstrate human-caused climate change is political and increasingly typical of the reactionary nature of Tea Party-Republicans. There is little 'conservative' in the rejection of common sense and established history and science; there is a lot reactionary in indiscriminately supporting whatever Charles and David Koch, the Heartland Institute, and certain elites of the one percent proclaim as their capitalistic privileges.

There has been much human progress because of the energy made available from fossil fuels for advancing technologies -- a rational analysis, however, informs us that the totality of this activity has not resulted in a perfect utopia, there are negative consequences as well. It is more reactionary than 'conservative' to blithly insist that burning coal, petroleum and natural gas on a massive scale will only result in a world of rainbows and unicorns, it is simply unvarnished truth that in real life bad comes along with the good. Nevertheless, we human beings also have the ability to change our behavior and apply our efforts to solving problems, even problems we ourselves have had a hand in creating.

(At its core, denial of global warming science is pessimistic: we are not capable of cleaning-up a mess that we made; dillusional: it is a conspiratorial plot to enslave us; juvenile: if it is happening a 'miracle' will appear to save us in the end; and reactionary: zealous adherence to political ideology takes precedence over recognition of changing conditions.)

As I have written here many, many times before, it is common sense that global climate change has evidenced itself: we cannot burn-up a least half of the reserves of tens of million of years of solar energy stored as fossil fuels in just 150 year and not expect a significant impact on humanity and the environment. This common sense, however, falls to politics and greed if it counters the economic self-interests of some of the richest, most powerful elitists in the United States -- and this is the nub of climate change denial.

However, in consession of common sense, it is my view that some folks have a tough time comprehending how the use by an ever expanding population of human beings (and especially industrially advanced cultures) creates the conditions for global warming. Human beings often have a difficult time with very large numbers, in our everyday world notions of millions and billions of anything is a near incomprehensible abstraction. When I was born in 1956, the world population wasn't even three billion people; today it is over over seven billion. To varying degrees, every single one of those people are extracting from the ground, from the waters, from the atmosphere the necessities and luxuries of existence.

Human beings certainly are plentiful and powerful enough to have momentous consequential effects on the ecosystems of this planet. It is often difficult for an individual to extrapolate from themselves, and their circle of family and friends, how seven billion other individuals add-up to have far-reaching impacts. The video report below on the effect of removing wolves from Yellowstone National Park 70 years ago is an example of how human actions can have unknowable and profound consequences.

(This difficulty with comprehending huge numbers is why, I think, some people have a hard time accepting evoltuion by natural selection; the idea of hundreds of millions of years of cumulative genetic change is difficult to wrap one's head around.)

But first, let's refute this canard about an eighteen year 'pause' is rising global temperature.

Decadal surface-air temperature (°C) via average of datasets maintained by the HadCRU, NOAA and NASA.

One of the prime arguments of climate change deniers is that human beings are too small and puny to do anything that could have a profound effect on the environment. Yet, the following video demonstrates how one rather minor decision (the eradication of wolves in Yellowstone just 70 years ago) led to significant ecological consequences.

Extrapolate from this example to the huge decisions humans have made over the last 200 years (since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution) that have had tremendous impacts ... like burning tens of million of years of stored solar energy in the form of coal, oil and gas, in just a bit over a century.

Anthropogenic climate change is not only expected science, it is just plain common sense. But let's face it, denying climate science is not really about the validity of the science -- it is about power politics and who makes the most money.

A short primer on the current state of the climate change discussion.

13 Misconceptions About Global Warming

Finally for those truly interested in understanding the basics of climate science and how the politics of reactionaryism have an effect on the conversation and on policy, here is a talk by Michael Mann at The Amazing Meeting for 2013, sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

It has already been written and the predictions made ... we will be reaping the consequences for the Bush/Cheney disaster in Iraq for at least a generation.

Contained within the first three paragraphs of Thomas Ricks's book, Fiasco, is the heart of why the United States is today mired in an unsolvable and intractable political and military morass in the Middle East. Make no mistake, the choices now for U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria are all bad and they all have their genesis in the Bush-ordered, unprovoked attack and invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq in March 2003.

President Obama, in my opinion, errs in involving our country in a regional conflict and in elevating the criminal gang he calls ISIL (Islamic State in the Levant) to 'combatant' status -- the same mistake Bush/Cheney made in transforming al Qaeda into a 'borderless state' so that they could have a 'war' on terror. ISIL and al Qaeda are organized criminal enterprises and should be treated as such: hunted down as low-life gangsters, apprehended or killed, and prosecuted as the reprehensible vermin they are.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is going to pursue the 'war' strategy, In Shift, White House Calls ISIS Fight A ‘War’- ABC News; September 12, 2014. This will mean conflict and entanglements with 'enemies' and 'allies' for years to come ... and it will mean the further redistribution of working class taxpayer dollars to the elites of the military-contractors-lobbyist machine.

Nevertheless, the strictly political and partisan attempt by reactionary Tea Party - Republicans to somehow blame Obama for this ongoing foreign policy catastrophe is disingenuous, propagandistic and subversive of the best interests of the our domestic prosperity and national security.

President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy. The consequences of his choice won’t be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information—about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda’s terrorism—and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices and a global economic shock.

This book’s subtitle terms the U.S. effort in Iraq an adventure in the critical sense of adventurism—that is, with the view that the U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation. Spooked by its own false conclusions about the threat, the Bush administration hurried its diplomacy, short-circuited its war planning, and assembled an agonizingly incompetent occupation. None of this was inevitable. It was made possible only through the intellectual acrobatics of simultaneously “worst-casing” the threat presented by Iraq while “best-casing” the subsequent cost and difficulty of occupying the country.

How the U.S. government could launch a preemptive war based on false premises is the subject of the first, relatively short part of this book. Blame must lie foremost with President Bush himself, but his incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story. It takes more than one person to make a mess as big as Iraq. That is, Bush could only take such a careless action because of a series of systemic failures in the American system. Major lapses occurred within the national security bureaucracy, from a weak National Security Council (NSC) to an overweening Pentagon and a confused intelligence apparatus. Larger failures of oversight also occurred in the political system, most notably in Congress, and in the inability of the media to find and present alternate sources of information about Iraq and the threat it did or didn’t present to the United States. It is a tragedy in which every major player contributed to the errors, but in which the heroes tend to be anonymous and relatively powerless—the front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions.

Monday, August 18, 2014

The results of this study shouldn't really surprise anyone ... being rich affects the character and personality of individuals; great affluence alters how a person behaves and how they end-up treating others.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

What good would ever come from the George W. Bush ordered unprovoked military attack and invasion by the U.S. on the sovereign nation of Iraq in 2003?

Many of us knew at the time that this was a mistake of momentous proportions.

Yet even in the face of the Hans Blix final report telling us that there weren't any 'weapons of mass destruction' (WMD) stockpiles or programs in Iraq; and in spite of no evidence of connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida -- the Bush/Cheney administration started the war.

That the U.S. lost that war was evident with the installation al-Maliki as Prime Minister in 2006 and Bush/Cheney acceptance of an essentially Iranian client government in Iraq. Is anyone really surprised that Iraq's further decline has now brought on the potential for more civil war ... or will even lead to the takeover of that country by a genuinely militant Sunni regime?

The Abu Ghraib torture that brought such shame upon this nation, the lies, the hundreds and hundreds of billions of lost dollars, the corruption of 'private contractors', the graft for Cheney's Halliburton, the mass of civilian Iraqi deaths and impoverishment, the sectarian violence, the empowerment of Iran, the thousands and thousand of U.S. lives lost and physically and/or psychologically ruined, and the geopolitical upheavals that reverberate to this day -- these are the legacies of the Bush/Cheney unprovoked attack on Iraq.

At least the military forces of the United States are out of the Iraq quagmire.

Yet, still there are those fulminating today that these disastrous consequences of Bush/Cheney policy are somehow the fault of President Obama.

To them I say: I don't care how old or young you are, whether you are male or female -- form-up a volunteer brigade, load-up your precious guns and go over there and aid the Shi'ite government of Mr. al-Maliki and fight to preserve the skewed Bush/Cheney vision for Iraq and the Middle East.

What are you waiting for?

Or is all the whining and finger-pointing at Pres. Obama what you desperately need to try and exculpate yourselves for being cheerleaders for the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history?

Monday, June 02, 2014

The problem for global warming deniers and Peak Oil/Coal skeptics is that common sense lines up with science -- the truth is rather evident -- antagonism to reality is just stubbornness and politics.

Here is the common sense: in just roughly 150 years, we human beings have burned-up about half of the recoverable accumulated energy/carbon of hundreds of million of years of solar energy stored in the form of petroleum, coal, and natural gas.

The notion that releasing all that energy in such a very short period of time wouldn't have a significant impact on the earth's environment defies common sense. From the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution until now, the actions of human beings have added significantly to the amount of green house gases in the atmosphere.

Then, of course, there is the science that backs-up the concept of human-caused (anthropogenic) climate change.

Denial of anthropogenic global warming is at its base about money -- the infamous Koch brothers, the mega-transnational energy corporations, oil speculators -- and all the campaign contributions they make especially to Republicans in the United States in the hopes of preserving profit. Along the way the profiteers pick-up the fearful conspiracists, the religiously deluded, the no-compromisers, the 'Tea Party' and various assorted sycophants of the plutocracy.

The study reported on May 12 about the melting of the west Antarctic ice shelf is sobering news and should have a unifying effect on humanity -- we are in peril and a sense of urgency ought to accelerate our efforts to face this crisis head-on.

This video well describes the science in the study:

Redirection away from fossil fuels is in our own self-interest for even modestly maintaining the current American standard of living. The reality of Peak Oil looms large and its effects are self-evident in any visit to the gasoline pump -- $100 a barrel oil is here to stay because the cheapest, easiest to produce oil is fading away. Besides the production constraints illuminated in this article 'Why the Oil Industry is Running Into Major Trouble', no further proof of Peak Oil is better than the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline controversy -- it is all about non-conventional oil production and delivery to the international market place for the further profit of the Koch brothers and the 1 percent.

It is truly unfortunate and momentously tragic that in these early years of the 21st century, in the world's allegedly most advanced nation, we are still having arguments about science, politics, religion and the impacts of human activity on the environment of the planet Earth. Our failure thus far to come together to seriously find solutions to anthropogenic climate change will have portentous, historic consequences ... and time is indeed finally running out.

Notices

Legal DisclaimerThe content on this site is provided without any warranty, express or implied. All opinions expressed on this site are those of the author and may contain errors or omissions.
NO MATERIAL HERE CONSTITUTES "INVESTMENT ADVICE" NOR IS IT A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY OR SELL ANY FINANCIAL INSTRUMENT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO STOCKS, OPTIONS, BONDS OR FUTURES.
The author may have a position in any company or security mentioned herein. Actions you undertake as a consequence of any analysis, opinion or advertisement on this site are your sole responsibility.

Fair UseThis site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.